Inspection and Intervention

Last night I performed the most complex operation within my hives to date.  The problem I'm trying to solve is that one of my hives, the "hill hive" is queenless.  Last weekend it looked like they had several emergency queen cells capped.  The hope is that they'll be able to raise their own queen.  However, upon inspection yesterday it looked like they were tearing down at least a couple of those queen cells, so either there's a virgin queen on the loose in that hive or they've given up on the emergency process.  In the former case, I have a hard enough time finding  a mated queen so there's no chance I'm going to find a virgin queen.  In the latter case, they're doomed.  Either way it looked like they were running out of capped brood, and there had been no uncapped brood for awhile.  So unless I intervened there wasn't going to be much of a chance for this hive to right itself and even if they could there was/is going to be a break in the brood cycle.  So with all this in mind I decided to put a brood frame from my healthy hive into the struggling hive.

I found a good looking, brand-new brood frame in the other hive that had all stages of baby bees - eggs, larvae, and even some capped brood.  I shook the bees off this frame and moved it into the struggling hive.  Fingers crossed, I hope this helps them.  I hope they have enough nurse bees to tend the brood frame I've given them.  They still had some capped brood and brood has been emerging over the past little while, so there *should* be some decent young bees in there.

Some other notes:

• The healthy "pink hive" has brood going on 8 out of 10 frames in the deep box and they've nicely drawn comb up in the medium super.  I went ahead and removed the queen excluder to give her room in the super to lay.  Based on what I've heard from other beekeepers in the area this is likely the final brood chamber configuration.  Anything above that will be queen-excluded honey supers.
• I found eggs on a non-black foundation frame in my healthy hive - my eye for spotting eggs is getting better.
• My eye for spotting my unmarked queen is still not so great.  I was unable to find her.  Though I was careful to make sure she wasn't on the frame I stole for the struggling hive.
• Beetle traps with apple cider vinegar don't work.  I've heard of folks doing this, but all of my vinegar evaporated within a week.  Perhaps this is a characteristic of warm weather - outside temps have been in the upper 80s/low 90s this past week.  Anyway, I've redeployed my traps with canola oil.